Health experts zero in on camels to fight deadly MERS virus

The fight against the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which has killed at least 722 people over the past five years, is honing in on its target: camels.

MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a member of a virus family ranging from the common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, appears to have emerged in humans in Saudi Arabia in 2012, but has now been traced back in camels to at least 1983.

Almost all the outbreaks so far originated in the Arabian Gulf, but MERS-CoV could infect humans wherever there are one-humped dromedary camels - two-humped bactrians are not affected.

That means people across a swathe of Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and South Asia are potentially at risk. So the hunt is on for vaccinations - both for humans, and camels.

“The virus is in camels everywhere. The virus is in Qatar, it’s in United Arab Emirates, it’s wherever we look,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, a disease outbreak expert at the World Health Organization (WHO), where 130 experts gathered last week to collaborate for the first time on tackling the disease.

“I know so much more about camels than I ever thought I would,” she said.

People have probably caught MERS in Africa but the absence of outbreaks recorded there may be due to poor disease surveillance, less contact with camels, or lower rates of underlying conditions like obesity and heart problems that make MERS more severe.

Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized for not being transparent about MERS, but Van Kerkhove said that had totally changed. It is now testing 70,000 human samples a year and generating a vast amount of research.

This is all well and good, but where is this vast amount of research being published? Maybe I should be digging deeper into Google Scholar; my usual MERS resources are the KSA MOH and WHO—which depends on the KSA MOH, and cranks out much-delayed reports with a smattering of more information than the MOH provides in its daily updates.

This has been the situation ever since MERS was identified back in 2012. We saw more research published by the Koreans, after their imported outbreak in 2015, than we've ever seen from the Saudis themselves.

We don't even have any backchannels from the Saudi healthcare system. The Saudi media are propaganda agencies for the House of Saud, and local experts seem to be thoroughly intimidated against leaking anything that might embarrass the government.

So a health problem with implications for a vast swathe of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia is being ignored instead of being attacked with all the resources of some very rich countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

The fight against the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which has killed at least 722 people over the past five years, is honing in on its target: camels.

MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a member of a virus family ranging from the common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, appears to have emerged in humans in Saudi Arabia in 2012, but has now been traced back in camels to at least 1983.

Almost all the outbreaks so far originated in the Arabian Gulf, but MERS-CoV could infect humans wherever there are one-humped dromedary camels - two-humped bactrians are not affected.

That means people across a swathe of Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan and South Asia are potentially at risk. So the hunt is on for vaccinations - both for humans, and camels.

“The virus is in camels everywhere. The virus is in Qatar, it’s in United Arab Emirates, it’s wherever we look,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, a disease outbreak expert at the World Health Organization (WHO), where 130 experts gathered last week to collaborate for the first time on tackling the disease.

“I know so much more about camels than I ever thought I would,” she said.

People have probably caught MERS in Africa but the absence of outbreaks recorded there may be due to poor disease surveillance, less contact with camels, or lower rates of underlying conditions like obesity and heart problems that make MERS more severe.

Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized for not being transparent about MERS, but Van Kerkhove said that had totally changed. It is now testing 70,000 human samples a year and generating a vast amount of research.

This is all well and good, but where is this vast amount of research being published? Maybe I should be digging deeper into Google Scholar; my usual MERS resources are the KSA MOH and WHO—which depends on the KSA MOH, and cranks out much-delayed reports with a smattering of more information than the MOH provides in its daily updates.

This has been the situation ever since MERS was identified back in 2012. We saw more research published by the Koreans, after their imported outbreak in 2015, than we've ever seen from the Saudis themselves.

We don't even have any backchannels from the Saudi healthcare system. The Saudi media are propaganda agencies for the House of Saud, and local experts seem to be thoroughly intimidated against leaking anything that might embarrass the government.

So a health problem with implications for a vast swathe of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia is being ignored instead of being attacked with all the resources of some very rich countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.